StarXiv: a podcast discussing the latest astronomy papers · Michelle and Payel

Episode 31 - Near Earth Objects, Little Red Dots, bursty star formation and life around massive stars

·33 min·1 clip

We discovered a seventh triple-double radio galaxy—here's why they matter.

Michelle and Pyle are back together after a while and say they missed podcasting together, then dive straight into episode 31 with three papers lined up. The first pick is Mighty, a paper on the discovery of a triple-double radio galaxy, led by Tombo Roivoriano at the University of Cape Town and published in MNRAS. They pause on the name and on the object class itself, because triple-double radio galaxies are something neither host had heard of before. The discussion starts with double-double radio galaxies, which are already rare, and then moves into the even rarer triple-double case, with attention on the coaxial structure and what repeated activity in the galaxy may be telling them. The second paper turns to Apophis. That section is less about drama than about population questions: where Apophis-like objects come from, how often they show up, and how many might come close to or hit Earth. They note that current monitoring says Apophis is not going to hit us, but the harder problem is tracing its origin. Rewinding the orbit is chaotic, so you can only go so far before the number of possibilities explodes. The Flora family is discussed as the most commonly suggested source, while other families remain possible. By the end, the episode moves into little red dots and a model that may fit, with the hosts treating it as something that could work if the underlying physics is right. The whole episode keeps its usual rhythm of naming the paper, checking the result against intuition, and sitting with what is still uncertain, so it feels like two astronomy readers working through new results aloud.

As heard by us

Rare astronomy research, told with curiosity and a steady conversational hand.

Episode 31 works best when it sticks to how astronomers talk through rare objects and uncertain origins. It moves from a rare radio galaxy find to Apophis and then to a third topic, and the thread holding it together is the same each time: the hosts keep separating what is known…

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Why you'd press play

You want a back-and-forth astronomy discussion that opens with a rare triple-double radio galaxy and then turns to Apophis.

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